Yep, Looks like another MSN Algo Update

About to throw in the towel...

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Fish_Texas

8:45 pm on Sep 29, 2006 (gmt 0)

After spending the month of August lowering KW density to the lowest on the planet and getting our site back to normal from the Aug 3rd shake up...Lost many cached pages in the last 24 hrs.What's up now? Is the cached page drop a glitch, or is it time to throw in the towel?Any feedback is appreciated.

How about a comment MSNDude.

Fish Texas

Fish_Texas

5:22 pm on Sep 30, 2006 (gmt 0)

Fish Texas UPDATE: I'm not sure about an update anymore, but my MSN cached page count has dropped...when I check the serps they are all still there with normal ranking. False alarm? Don't know.

msndude

9:35 pm on Oct 1, 2006 (gmt 0)

Nope, not an algorithmic update. We've been contending with a few mega spammers lately, and that's probably causing more instability than usual. Apologies for the inconvenience.

JoeSinkwitz

6:57 pm on Oct 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

MSNdude,

I see sooo much of this spammer right now. On one hand, I really am impressed with him/her. On the other, please...blogspot probably isn't the most relevant result 8/10 times for a phrase on a single SERP.

Question: Does the quality of the SERPs improve when you filter out large subdomain hosted sites (like blogspot) when querying against the commerical indicator? If a phrase is >X% liklihood of being commerical, then one of those subdomain sites is more likely to be spam -- I'd be curious as to the results of that. Undoubtedly a few false positives, but I'd have to think it'd really clean things up.

Cygnus

Praxus

2:14 pm on Oct 4, 2006 (gmt 0)

I have never seen a case where any result from a blogspot page belongs in the top sites - yet it is consistently in the very top listings for most competitive keywords. Msndude once said that simply blocking blogspot pages from the top results isn't the best way to fight that type of spam. Sure, technically such a simple rule is not the kind of advanced spam detection you'd want your search engine to have - BUT the fact is, whatever spam detection they are using is ineffective again blogspot and other redirects.

From a marketing angle - in terms of cleaning up the search results - I would definitely think they it would only be a WIN to simply exclude blogspot pages from showing up in the top rankings for any search. Meanwhile in the lab they can keep working on a more elegant solution.

I really think this is a case where the marketers /PR folks need to overule the techs.

surftrack

2:13 pm on Oct 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

i whole heartedly agree to that.

when it comes to quality serp results, best algo is not necessarily best for users.

crobb305

7:58 pm on Oct 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

I see sooo much of this spammer right now. On one hand, I really am impressed with him/her. On the other, please...blogspot probably isn't the most relevant result 8/10 times for a phrase on a single SERP.

I may not know about the spammer that you guys are talking about, but I have to say that things sure have gotten stale since mid-summer. There were loads of very impressive improvements, then they stopped. They stopped just short of getting rid of the "junk" splogs.

Hopefully things will be picking up here soon, with the holidays just around the corner.

steveb

9:06 pm on Oct 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

The results do seem to keep getting incrementally better. The absolute trash is less, even if plenty is still around.

Suddomain problems still exist, etc, and they still have virtually zero recognition of authority (trivial domains outranking industry leaders with better quality info) but they are way better than four months ago.

aok88

2:11 pm on Oct 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

msndude - when you say "We've been contending with a few mega spammers lately" - what happens if you're not a mega spammer, but MSN lost 90% of your pages in their index and now get no decent rankings or traffic from msn anymore for one site?

Maybe I haven't found it yet, but lots of people have asked this question "what happened to our site in MSN, we got wiped out?", and I haven't seen you answer or mention anything.

If you've lost most of our pages, did we trip a new filter? Did you lose a bunch of servers? What?

CainIV

5:48 pm on Oct 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

Definitely some authority sites lost in this one, and a major white elephant in terms of the blogpost domains outranking many fine sites out there.

The biggest issue I see is that when updates are done, sites that previously ranked high in MSN 'seem' to be tossed and new ones take their place. It would be frustrating for a surfer who expects to see some consistency.

If a site is not valuable enough to a surfer to be in the first 5 pages yesterday, and without anything being changed is now listed 5th on page one, that's inconsistency.

Still much work to be done...

[edited by: CainIV at 5:54 pm (utc) on Oct. 6, 2006]

crobb305

6:41 pm on Oct 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

We've been contending with a few mega spammers lately, and that's probably causing more instability than usual. Apologies for the inconvenience.

It seems to me that the collection of smaller spammers might be greater than the effect of one or two mega spammers. The serps are really getting muddied up by splogs right now. Really need to get something out soon to allow for an algorithmic elimination of this spam.

Praxus

8:33 pm on Oct 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

What's hard to understand, is that many of us know that MSN likes sites with low kw density; at least since the end-of-may update. Yet so many of these blogspot redirect sites are extremely keyword heavy (if you 'view source' before the redirect kicks in) and they are still top ranked. I don't get that.

steveb

9:39 pm on Oct 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

Keyword density has been irrelevant for years.

Praxus

11:10 pm on Oct 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

I totally disagree with that statement. Many people have had sites drop way down in the rankings since the last major update because the spam filter penalized high kw density. Before the may update, having a high kw density was a big step in getting high rankings.

The only thing I can think of for top rank of so many splogs is that their 5000 guestbook spamming backlinks are counted for a lot more than the kw density. However backlinks are only worth a limited amount on MSN since many high ranking sites just have a handful of backlinks..

steveb

3:11 am on Oct 7, 2006 (gmt 0)

Life would be dull if everybody agreed.

Life would be even duller if I spent more than five seconds thinking about keyword density, especially with MSN where what matters is links and keyword left of the tld.